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Having previously read his son Mike's autobiography, Fun is Good related to his time as owner of the St. Paul Saints, it's finally time to pick up daddy's, who spent time owning the Milwaukee Brewers, Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox, and St. Louis Browns. The first chapter is all about the time he put a midget up-to-bat in the big leagues.

I liked We, or at least I didn't NOT like it. I don't know, I might not be smart enough to understand Russian literature, even translated into my native tongue. The story is fine, a brilliant mathematician doing the work to design the spaceship that will bring organization and reason to planets beyond our imagination, but in the process meets a girl, its always a girl isn't it, who introduces freedom to his life and turns the world upside down.

I guess I really didn't like the love interest, this I-330 character, particularly as our protagonist D-503 had a fine familial triangle with O and R before she showed up like the little homewrecker, she is, How I can say that in a world that everyone is everyone else's property including the sexual use of whomever you please, as long as it's within the rhythms of her cycle, I don't know. But I felt O was a fine girl and I-330 never seemed to really love D-503 but was very mysterious and I guess some men go for that.

It was not a happy ending, which I never like, and I almost did not read it since the book's introduction itself told me it would not be a happy ending. I almost brought it right back to the library.

But it is told interestingly, through a bit of a diary, including several mentions like this will be the last I write to you, unknown reader followed by several more chapters when apparently not.

And yet this book gave spoilers to its end in its own introduction. I've too frequently found this an issue of reading re-releases of "classics."

God Needs No Passport wasn't quite what I was expecting. I would say this book is more about transnationalism in general than the American religious landscape. Levitt uses Boston, MA as a case study for all of the United States and interviews over 200 people from four different immigrant communities India (Hindu), Pakistan (Muslim), Ireland (Catholic), & Brazil (Christian, primarily Pentecostal). She also goes through a number of native-born Americans and their position on religion, particularly of new arrivals, ranging from the evangelical anti-religious, to the as long as they are the right kind of religion, to everyone is part of our melting pot. Similarly, she finds several different groups of believers among her immigrant interviewees, the most disturbing of which I found to be the "golden rulers" who have "studied all the religions" and found them all to teach basically the same thing. Thankfully Levitt does point out that these folks haven't actually studied any religion, but since none of them seem to specifically say to be mean to everyone, then they are all teaching to be nice to everyone. All of these different people with all of their similar names made it kind of hard for me to keep track. For a while I kept flipping back to the beginning to check who was who but eventually, I gave up and decided it wasn't that important. This book was written in 2007 and has very much a post-9/11-feel with an uncomfortable amount of emphasis on international terrorism and some people's attempts at blaming religion for such. All-in-all it kept me longing for more, so the pages kept turning, but I never quit got filled.

Originally added to my queue when it was referenced. In the biography of Blessed Michael J. McGivney's biography. I don't even remebers what the conection was now.

This is a photo intensive essay on the lives of New York City firefighters around the turn of the 20th century.

@gersande@millefeuilles.cloud so many Americans try to paint modern immigrants as somehow different from their own ancestors. The fact so many keep ties to home and a portion even move back is part of their argument to keep new Americans as "other" but ta-dah even back when travel and communicating were much more difficult they were still doing it. It's just normal and it's part of being American.

Now that's something they didn't teach us in school.